


Black as Wood

by Pandora



Category: Schneewittchen | Snow White (Fairy Tale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:38:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once there was a queen who wished for a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as wood.  Once there was a girl with a cruel mother.  Once there was a princess lost to the forest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black as Wood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stillskies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillskies/gifts).



When I was seven years old, my mother shut me out of the house on a frozen-silent winter day. Or rather, she stood and watched at her window as her maiden took my arm and yanked, dragging me out the door with her. I think that, through the blur of my big, glassy, stupid tears, I kicked at her leg. But I only wore my black silk slippers for dancing lessons, and I only felt her shifting, broom swift skirts, and I doubt it hurt her. Then she pushed me away, and I was lying in a heap of fresh, sugarsoft snow. The door was already shut, and oh yes, I knew even then, locked. I watched it, confused in a numbed, passive way.

I had always been a good girl, a _little darling_. So I can say, years later, that I didn’t know how to do anything else.

My mother had said to her mirror, and her reflection in her bleeding-red silk dress, and her long, long black hair: _I don’t want to look at you anymore_.

I wiped at my nose, and sniffled a lump of thick, greasy snot. My eyes were swollen, and I cried for a few more gasping minutes. A raven burst out of one of the bony trees in the woods with a shriek, and then its shadow flew across the flung out, sheet white sky.

Then I looked up, and saw the glare of my mother’s red dress at her window. Then she moved, and the lace curtains swayed closed. She walked away. Back to the mirror, where she watched herself brush out her hair. Or she sat at her writing desk, and began a letter to my father, who was away on one of his hunting trips, on the pale, lilac perfumed paper she ordered from the city.

My legs shook as I finally, finally stood up. I looked back at the house, and the polished, blind gleam of the upstairs windows. Nobody moved inside. None of the other servants—the matching housemaids with their clockwork blinking eyes, or the houseboy, or the housekeeper, or the steward--would dare to act against my mother’s wishes. Then I walked off, pushing a path in the snow, towards the trees, towards the Imperial forest that grew just around our house.

Oh, I had always known, since I was first allowed outside without my leading strings, that I wasn’t to go there alone, _ever_. My nurse has reminded me of that in constant, barkrough whispers. But that could hardly matter now.

My shoes were stuffed-swollen with snow, and my cheeks burned. My hair was done up in two, whiptight braids, but I still had loosened wisps of it batting my face.

Several minutes, and some feet, later, I stopped. I didn’t know what I should do next, and so I thought back to the few books I had read. One of them had a story about a little servant girl who had frozen into a statue on a winter’s day after she was impertinent to her old, dear, sickly mother. She had worn a brown dress with several patches made from bright, floral print petticoats on the skirt, and had a mess of golden hair. The old mother was a pale, dust-grey ghost in her bed under a heap of ratty, shabby quilts.

She looked as my mother might have, back inside. She would have frowned as she thought what had happened was my fault. I’m sure she accepted a rose petal silk handkerchief from her hovering maiden. She was a tall girl, who I wasn’t old enough yet to realize was still a girl, only sixteen years old, with the same honey-gold hair as the naughty, _ungrateful_ girl in the book. My mother’s reflections glowed inside her eyes.

 _I understand, milady_ , the maiden would have said.

 _I hate you_ , I told her in my mind, as I never could to my mother.

But in another story, a princess in a brown bear coat found a little cottage off in the forest, miles from her father’s castle. I was still little enough to believe in that, and so, my feet turning hard and sore as ice, I began to walk.

\--

Once there was a queen who was known for her beauty. When she was a princess, she had been the most beautiful woman in the fifty island kingdoms, and her image was still caught in the starlight flash of the cameras at state and charity events. She had raven black, ebony black hair that had a mirror-gloss in sunlight, and charcoal-grey eyes. She only ever gave quick, secret-holding smiles that the people, her people, _just adored_. But she had been married to the King for ten years, and she had yet to have a child.

She went to several of the best fertility specialists, because it had to be her fault. But they told her they couldn’t find anything wrong with her.

The King took a mistress, a young woman who had just finished her dutiful, aimless business college degree. Her ambitious brother had shoved her at him at a masquerade party. Everyone knew this, and the Queen knew, when she looked at her ladies-in-waiting, and they looked away, that they pitied her.

Then one day, the Queen was in her private sitting room looking over a document she needed to sign, when she gave herself a swift, stinging paper cut. _Oh_ , she said in irritation, and smeared a bit of her red silk blood on the paper.

Since she was alone, she slumped down in her chair and looked out the window at the snowy, emptied courtyard below. _If only_ , she said, watching the blood swell from her cut, _if only I could have a little boy, as red as blood, as white as snow, and as black as wood_.

And it is true that only weeks after that, she was pregnant. The King rejoiced at the prospect of finally getting his boy, and his mistress’s brother sulked. But when the baby was born, induced several weeks late, it was a girl.

\--

My mother, like most mothers, wanted me to be a boy. When the midwife told her what I was, she turned her face away, her teeth clenched in a snarl. Finally she said: _Take it away. I don’t know how I shall explain this to His Lordship—_

\--

My mother came to see me at my dorm while I was studying for my final, the second final of the week, in The Birth of Europe and the European States. It was a locked building, but I know how she managed, so easily, so charming, to get in. She only had to stand outside, in her black fur coat and glossy, just dyed hair, holding the box done up with silver paper and a bow with glitter-mirror bits, waiting for someone to come. I only knew that I was flapping through my big, used, textbook, past paragraphs buried in neon yellow and neon pink highlighter, when there was a soft taptap at my door.

I didn’t have any friends on my floor, so I thought it had to be the RA, who I didn’t quite trust or like. “What it is?” I said, pushing my chair back.

“It’s your mother,” she said, in the voice that should have stayed in my nightmares. We are talking about the woman who looked at me as though I were her reflection, who had beat me with her hairbrush when I was fourteen, and _finally_ taller than she was.

I yanked the door open. “How did you get in.”

“Oh, this nice girl let me in when I told her I was your mother,” she said, already walking past me. She smelled like cold air and her expensive, birthday present perfume. “I would have called, but you haven’t given me your number.”

“I’m busy,” I said, stepping back, suddenly awkwardly tall. I looked down at my feet, and my grey socks. My shoes sat over by the radiator. “What do you want?”

“Really,” she said, with a dramatic, fluttering sigh. “I only came to give you this. I was out shopping, and I was sure you would like it--”

And I took the box from her, to get this over with. She sat at the edge of my bed and watched me as I tore off the wrapping paper, and the knife-glittering bow. The box was from the expensive department store where she had the charge account that so amused the father. I opened it, and inside the cloud of tissue paper was a corset. A dark corset with embroidered, moonlight vines twisting over it.

You can’t just look through a store and find that. She’d had it custom made, from the measurements left over from my senior ball gown. But then, my mother lied all the time.

“Try it on,” my mother said, in her most relentless voice. “I insist.”

And just as I had when she brought me that ball gown, as weak, as sniveling as ever, I took it out of the box, and the red, red apple that had been hidden inside it rolled out. It looked false at first--until I touched it, and its skin wasn’t plastic, it was smooth and real. It didn’t have a single bruise, and the flesh inside had to be white and crisp and perfect.

I don’t remember my mother watching in the mirror as I took off my shirt (a plain, boys department black turtleneck) so she could clamp me into the corset.

I haven’t tried to remember when I picked up the apple, and felt my teeth break through the skin and crush the insides into juice.

But I do remember falling across my bed, the room turned over upside down in front of me, and hearing a mouse-squeak when I tried to speak. My mother loomed over me, and I felt her hand as she straightened out my skirt. She smiled with her bruised-dark mouth, and then she spoke, but I couldn’t hear any of the words.

I didn’t have to. _There_ , she said, before she turned to stuff the paper into the emptied box. _You look decent. I’m sure you don’t want the nice men who try to save your life to see your underwear! Perish that thought_.

\--

Several weeks after the princess turned fifteen, she disappeared while she was staying with her parents at their forest house. Their staff kept it quiet as long as they could; when they couldn’t, the King said, in a televised appearance, that the princess was going through a difficult period in her life. He never explained what that meant, only that she was staying with some of her mother’s relatives, and he hoped, he demanded, that the public respect her privacy. The station then showed the princess’s picture. It had been taken only several months before on the grand staircase at the annual charity ball.

The princess had worn a sugar-pink silk dress, and her black, inkspill hair was done up in ringlets. Her face was only a pale, dull blur.

Meanwhile, the Queen sat in her room in front of her mirror, still wearing her dressing gown, her hair filled with glittering silver threads. She had to turn away, after minutes, and then an hour, and call for her senior lady-in-waiting.

No one believed the King, but few enough actually much cared. And whatever happened, the princess never came back, never stopped to pose for another photograph while her mother and her nursie stood hovering and guarding nearby.

The King found himself without an heir. But that happens--in the old days, it happened more often than one would think. There was a war in one country after the King’s heir, the princess with the star shaped scar on her forehead, disappeared, and returned only as the Queen of another, rival country. Her brother Benjamin, who everyone had believed to have died as a child in the snow fever outbreak, was at her side as her champion.

She could have taken her country back, but she didn’t. When she left, after her father surrendered, after a close, first cousin took his throne, she never returned. The King would have known that story. He would have known how it was.

\--

After a while, I came, stumbling and tired now, out of a ragged group of trees and into the clearing where the cabin was. Well, it was really just an old, abandoned storage shed, made from old, greyed boards. The door had creaked open, so I went inside. It was just as cold in there as it had been outside, and there were rocks scattered on the dirt floor. I knew, even without a woman’s scolding voice around, not to sit in the dirt, so I hunched over. My feet had started hurting minutes before, and my toes crossed together inside my shoes.

I leaned against one of the walls, and pulled the ends of my sleeves over my hands. My feet clenched up like fists. I will say I hope I never feel that again.

Then, after I shut my eyes, and the shed sighed around me, I heard it. The faint, whistle howl of a dog.

Only several minutes after that, the door flung open, and my mother’s maiden, wrapped up in a black wool coat and a fur hat, grabbed my arm. _You stupid brat_ , she said, and I saw the blush-print handprint on her face. She had been punished. _She would have let you back in if you’d only waited a few more minutes—_

Then she turned and called outside: _She’s in here_.

 _Good_ , a man’s voice said.

She took me outside to meet several of my father’s men and their dogs. I was already in my usual soft, weak, simpering tears. I was still little enough for them to ignore it. But the maiden did let go of my arm, and one of the dogs, a grey-white wolf with winter sky eyes, came sniffing up to me, and I felt all right for a moment as I pet her fur.

\--

The Queen had not seen her stepdaughter in over several years when she received an announcement-letter from their neighboring country. She opened it while the messenger stood next to her chair, and she took a moment to gasp when she saw what it was. The new King had just announced his marriage to the Lady Angelet, _to her husband’s worthless daughter and missing heir, the Princess Angelet_. Her image shivered in the mirror (I can’t go, it said in its quiet, riversong voice, _I won’t go_ ). But then the Queen took in a breath, and remembered how to act, and remembered to be calm.

She even managed to smile at the messenger. “I will have a reply for your master in a few minutes. I’ve heard he doesn’t care to wait.”

(And if she hadn’t heard that, she would have guessed as his marriage was to be held in only three eager, rushed, scandalous weeks.)

She arrived in her best gown, a white silk affair crusted with lake pearls and snow embroidery, accompanied by five of her ladies. A page showed her into the grand hall, and:

Her stepdaughter was sitting on the high throne staring down, down at her. She wore a thin halo of a crown in her black hair, and an elegant, burning white dress.

Her husband sat next to her, holding her hand as though it were his own expensive, white silk theatre glove. He nodded to a manservant standing just behind him—

But it was the young queen who spoke: “We have a present for you. _Momma_.”

The Queen turned, too late, too slow, towards the great hearth, where a servant was taking something out of the flames. Her ladies-in-waiting gasped: it was two iron sandals, still glowing sunglare orange from the flames. The servant was coming towards them. The Queen didn’t have time to run before several of the guards were with her. She had never seen them before in her life, but they looked at her with loathing.

“Don't resist,” one of them said in a low, rough whisper only she had to hear. “It won't do you any good.”

“My dear mother in law,” the King said, looming to his feet. He was tall, with autumn-brown hair and cat green eyes, and young, the right age for his wife; the Queen would have found him handsome only moments before. “We are so pleased that you chose to honor us with your presence tonight. Now, we want you to dance for us.”

The whole assembled court watched as the guards forced the burning stove iron shoes onto her feet. Her own ladies restrained her. She shrieked in pain, but only once, before she was gagged with a handkerchief. The young queen didn’t like the noise. Then her ladies pushed her out onto the floor. She danced. Oh, she hopped and ran, her feet smoking and cooking inside the shoes, and she danced.

\--

I woke up on my bed, in a spill of faded, watercolor light from the overhead fixture, while someone pushed on my chest. _One, two, three, four_ , a man’s voice said, a voice I didn’t know, in a chant. I opened my mouth, and when he turned me onto my side, I jerked, and a white bite of apple fell out, slick with drool, onto the sheets. I gasped out air. The man helped me sit up, and yes, I needed his help. The room was as faded as something I remembered from a dream, and my legs felt stuffed with rags. I looked at him, and my mouth shook into a bad attempt at a smile.

He had autumn-brown hair, some of it clipped back with a purple barrette, and green-gold eyes. Fairy eyes, I remembered, absurdly, from an old book and an older story.

Megan, with her eager, squirming curly hair and drowning extra-large sweatshirt, Megan who lived downstairs, my acquaintance and classmate Megan, came into view at the foot of the bed. Her mother was, I remembered from one night in the dining hall, a nice housewife who made beef stew, apple crisp, and varied chicken dishes far better than what the cooks made there. “Oh, thank goodness. You’re back. How do you feel?”

My voice was a raven croak, but I swallowed, and said: “I’ve been better.”

“Yeah, I would suppose you have,” she said. “It’s a good thing I came by to see if I could borrow your notes for psychology, and that Clovis knows first aid.”

I looked back at the man, at Clovis. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome,” he said. He sounded kind, and earnest, and though I’ve never been good at trusting men, I almost believed him. I was sure I would find out, later, that he was gay. “I’m just glad I was here.”

Megan came over with my limp, shed black turtleneck. The corset was in the middle of the floor, its laces drooling; I supposed they had gone after it first. Clovis stood up in an easy, cat-slinking way I still noticed. I wondered if he was a dancer. (He wasn’t, and I would know that later.) He looked towards the window, a nice boy, _a good boy_ , while Megan helped me into the shirt. My throat was raw, and I moved my arms as though I were controlling a stiff, wooden puppet.

“What happened?” she said, once we were done. “We found you there on the bed. You weren’t breathing at all, and you looked dead. I think you _were_ dead.”

“My mother--” I managed to make myself say.

She made her eyes wide and shocked and sympathetic. “Oh. I remember you had to request a new phone number so she couldn’t call you. I’m sorry.”

Later, I found out that a girl on the third floor, returning from her biology final, had let my mother into the building. She came and found me in the television lounge to apologize. But I wouldn’t blame her. She knew me as little as I knew her, mostly by sight and first name, and I know how convincing my mother must have been.

My mother must have loved me once. Oh, she first hit me when I was too young to remember it, and put out her long, elegant, ladyfinger cigarettes on my back, pushed me down the long, curving, amusement park staircase one bad, miserable night, and lied--to me, to my teachers, and on several occasions, even to the father. She had wanted me to be a little girl who looked just like her, so I know she loved me when I was that idea.

(A little girl with long charcoal black hair, who she could dress in smaller versions of her own clothes. A little girl who was beautiful, but not too bright, who echoed in a dainty, music box murmur, _Mother, Mother_.)

But I learned, almost too late, to despise her. I must never love her again. I know that if I do, that will be the day my mother has my updated address written down on a limp cocktail napkin. She will come to kill me, and this time, she will succeed.

\--

The night before Princess Angelet’s wedding, she dreamt that she stood in the snow outside the window of her stepmother’s private dining room. The glass was warm under her hands, and she pushed up against it, watching her stepmother take her seat, and a servant—no, one of the Queen’s most trusted, loyal senior ladies-in-waiting--bring her a gold plate with a steaming lump of meat on it, arranged with a mess of lettuce and doll-sized carrots. The Queen smiled, and blood-juice ran down her chin as she ate.

The meat began to twitch and thump on the plate, and that was when she knew what she should have known before: _It was her heart_.

(And she tried to move in her bed in the guest suite, in her snow-soft white nightdress, but her body was filled with heavy, damp sand. She was still wandering through the dream, and the end, the door, was miles away.)

She hadn’t felt it working and beating inside her for days, or even weeks. She was cold, her skin turned hard as porcelain, and she couldn’t feel anything. She wasn’t angry, or anything so mundane, so trivial as _sad_. She felt nothing—

\--

The princess is wandering through the great, night forest, dressed in a dingy tiger skin rug. Sometimes she leaps up and screams like a tiger. She’ll be like that until someone, a prince--or _fine_ , it might not be a prince--looks close enough to see her perfect genetics. But for now, she is fit only for the kitchen and the stable. For now, she only whispers one word, the only name she wants, the name she shares with her mother: _Beatrice. Beatrice_.

\--

Some years after that day in the forest, I watched over my mother as she burned away in a fever. My father came rushing back from court, but he arrived a week too late. I will say that she didn’t know me, or I wouldn’t have felt any pity for her. The maiden had to cut her hair short, after it turned into a heavy, snarled, sweaty mess. I’m sure she would have been humiliated, and then enraged, if she had known, but she didn’t. The maiden wept dainty, pearl-sweet tears; I doubt she noticed that when I came to my mother’s room to see her, once the physician had cleared me, I never did.

The maiden then became my personal servant. I was fourteen, still a miss waiting in the schoolroom, but I was the only mistress she had. We understand each other—or at least, that is what I have decided to say.

My father returned to his place at court, and one year later, he remarried. My stepmother was an easy woman with glass-grey eyes and pale hair and a shivering, soft voice. She was already five-and-twenty, a spinster who lived with her older brother and his wife, and was relieved to be married.

I have never told her about my mother. She wouldn’t know how to hear what I said. She needs to think that I loved her, and mourned her, bravely and earnestly, for years.

The day after my stepmother came to the house with her no-longer-hoping trousseau, my mother’s mirror exploded into a heap of knife-sharp pieces. I was the only one in the room when it happened (and no, I’ve never known how. The window was cracked open to let in the melting-damp air, but that couldn’t be it) and I picked up all the pieces. I cut my finger on one of them, and yes, after the first instant as the blood swelled up and leaked out, it did hurt, in a tiny, throbbing heartbeat.

But I only bandaged it myself, and then went back to work. I had to get all of the glass picked up, down to the last glitter-bit. And I have endured much worse than that.

*


End file.
